Sadly, the practice of over-pricing under-quality goods began with the firing on Fort Sumter and continued to the surrender at Appomattox, making fortunes for many New York businessmen. Victuallers made huge profits selling spoiled meat, and hostlers-responding to the constant call for horses-provided old, blind and spavined mounts to the government at outrageous prices. Some uniforms were made from whatever cloth was available, of nonregulation color, which sometimes resulted in soldiers firing upon their own comrades by mistake. Harper’s Weekly defined shoddy as “a villainous compound, the refuse stuff and sweepings of the shop, pounded, rolled, glued, and smoothed to the external form and gloss of cloth.” A writer for the New York Tribune painted an equally graphic picture: “Shoddy” was “poor sleezy stuff, woven open enough for seives, and then filled with shearman’s dust….Soldiers, on the first day’s march or in the earliest storm, found their clothes, overcoats, and blanket, scattering to the wind in rags or dissolving into their primitive elements of dust under the pelting rain.” The production of third-rate uniforms and accessories gave the language a new word: shoddy. With officials more concerned with lining their own pockets than establishing a system of standards, there was little quality control over the goods that went into the field. In some instances, the soles of soldiers’ shoes were made with glued-together wood chips that would fall apart after only half an hour on the march. Other manufacturers learned to cut corners as well, as greedy businessmen produced cheap knapsacks, blankets and hats. And when the government looked for cloth abroad, the mill owners and contractors cried foul in the name of patriotism. Woolen mills all over the North, operating at outlandish profit margins, shamelessly cheated the government. Asked why he did not lower his prices in consideration of using lesser materials, proprietor Elisha Brooks replied, “I think that I cannot ascertain the difference without spending more time than I can now devote to that purpose.” So brazen was the company’s chicanery that the New York Legislature finally ordered $45,000 worth of uniforms replaced. In 1861 alone, Brooks Brothers filled orders for 36,000 uniforms. Far from protecting soldiers from inclement weather, these uniforms fell apart in the first rain. The New Yorkers had to pay for their own uniforms out of their clothing allowance, so they took a double hit.īut this was not the worst of it: Facing a shortage of wool, Brooks Brothers glued together shredded, often decaying rags composed of various materials, pressed them into a semblance of cloth and sewed them into uniforms. Turned out in only a few weeks, the uniforms were so ill fitting-many lacking buttons and buttonholes-that the New York Volunteers who wore them were taunted by other soldiers. It had obtained the contract through questionable means, and proceeded to fill the order in much the same way. Brooks Brothers, for example, was awarded an initial contract for 12,000 uniforms just two weeks after war was declared. The problem became epidemic as the war progressed, and nowhere was it more blatant than in New York City.ĭuring one week alone in November 1861, New York businesses generated nearly $3 million from military contracts.

During the Civil War, corruption reached an almost incomprehensible level as government representatives awarded contracts based not on the best product, or the fairest price, but on the highest bribe. To cheat in business is one thing, but to send our soldiers to war with substandard equipment surely must constitute a form of treason. troops in the field.” Where an opportunity exists to sacrifice quality for the sake of a greater profit margin, a contractor or manufacturer will sometimes seize it- and then we, as citizens of the richest and most powerful of the world’s nations, are shocked. The alleged villains range from an individual reaping dirty millions for making faulty body armor to corporations such as Halliburton, accused of providing “shoddy services to U.S. War profiteering enriched opportunists-and shortchanged soldiers.Įvery now and again, a news article surfaces on the subject of war profiteering.

Shotty vs shoddy